“No idea,” Tellman confessed. “Looks like she used the electricity for the tricks more than anything else. In fact, come to think of it, there are only three electric lights altogether. Maybe she meant to get more?”
“And got the bulbs first?” Pitt raised his eyebrows.
Tellman shrugged his square, thin shoulders. “What we need to find out is what she knew about those three people that made one of them kill her. They all had secrets of one sort, and she was blackmailing them. I’d lay odds on that!”
“Well, Kingsley came because of his son’s death,” Pitt replied. “Mrs. Serracold wanted to contact her mother, so presumably hers is a family matter lying in the past. We have to be certain who Cartouche is, and why he came.”
“And why he wouldn’t even tell her his name!” Tellman said angrily. “For my money, that means he’s someone we’d recognize. And his secret is so bad he won’t risk that.” He grunted. “What if she recognized him? And that was why he had to kill her?”
Pitt thought about it for a few moments. “But according to both Mrs. Serracold and General Kingsley, he didn’t want to speak to anyone in particular . . .”
“Not yet! Perhaps he would have, once he’d really believed she could do it!” Tellman said with rising certainty. “Or perhaps when he was convinced she was genuine, he would have asked for someone. What if he was still testing her? From both witnesses, it sounds as if that was what he was trying to do.”
Tellman was right. Pitt acknowledged it, but he had no answer. The suggestion that it had been Francis Wray was not one that he believed, not if it included the possibility that it was he who had deliberately knelt on Maude Lamont’s chest and forced the egg white and cheesecloth down her throat, then held her until she choked to death, gasping and gagging as it filled her lungs, fighting for life.
Tellman was watching him. “We’ve got to find him,” he said grimly. “Mr. Wetron insists it’s this man in Teddington. He says the evidence will be there, if we look for it. He half suggested I send a squad of men over there and—”
“No!” Pitt cut across him sharply. “If anyone goes, I will.”
“Then you’d better go today,” Tellman warned. “Otherwise Wetron may—”
“Special Branch is in charge of this case.” Again Pitt interrupted him.
Tellman stiffened, his resentment still clear in his eyes and the hard set of his face. His jaw was tight and there was a tiny muscle ticking in his temple. “Don’t have a lot to show for it, though, do we?”
Pitt felt himself flush. The criticism was fair, but it still hurt, and the fact that in Special Branch he was out of his depth, and aware of it, and someone else had his position in Bow Street, made it worse. He did not dare to think of failure, but it was always at the back of his mind, waiting for an unguarded moment. When he was at home in the empty house, weary and without any clear idea where to look next, it was a black hole at his feet and falling into it was a possibility all too real.
“I’ll go,” he said curtly. “You’d better do more to find out how she got her blackmail material. Was it all watching and listening, or did she do some active research? It may help to know.”
Tellman appeared undecided, one emotion conflicting with another in his face. It looked like anger and guilt, perhaps regret for having said aloud what was in his mind. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he muttered, and turned to leave.
Sitting in the train to Teddington, Pitt turned over in his mind all the possible lines of enquiry about Francis Wray. Always at the forefront was the leaflet he had seen on the table advertising Maude Lamont, and the fury in Wray’s face at mention of spirit mediums. He denied to himself that the old man was so emotionally disturbed by the death of his wife he had lost mental balance, and perhaps he had, in the first depth of his grief, abandoned a lifetime’s faith and gone to a medium. He certainly would not be unique in that, not even unusual. And with the vehemence of his conviction that it was sin, he would then have equated the medium with the offense, and have tried to rid himself of his self-loathing by destroying her! And the more that thought intruded into Pitt’s mind, the more fiercely he tried to deny it.
When he reached Teddington he got off the train, but this time he avoided Udney Road and went to High Street. He loathed asking the villagers about Francis Wray, but there was no choice left to him. If he did not, then Wetron would send others who would be even clumsier, and cause more pain.
He had to use an invention. He could hardly say outright, “Do you think Mr. Wray has lost the hold of his sanity?” He framed instead questions as to things having been lost, lapses of memory, other people’s concern that Wray was unwell. It was not as difficult as he had expected simply to find the words, but forcing himself to pry into the way the old man’s grief had affected him was one of the most offensive things he had ever done, not to the people he spoke to, but to himself.
The answers all carried the same elements. Francis Wray was deeply liked and admired, perhaps loved would not have been too strong a word. But those who answered Pitt were also anxious for Wray, aware that his loss had left him more vulnerable than they were sure he could deal with. Friends had been uncertain whether to call in to see him or not. Was it intrusive, disturbing a private emotion, or was it a much-needed respite from the utter loneliness of the house with no one to speak to but young Mary Ann, who was devoted to his welfare but hardly a companion to him.
Pitt did manage to draw something from one of these friends, another man roughly Wray’s age, and also a widower. Pitt found him in his garden tying up the most magnificent pink hollyhocks, well above the height of his own head.
“It’s only a matter of concern,” Pitt explained himself. “There is no complaint.”
“No, of course,” Mr. Duncan answered, pulling off a length of string from the ball and cutting it awkwardly with his secateurs. “I am afraid when we get old and lonely we tend to make nuisances of ourselves without realizing it.” He smiled a little ruefully. “I daresay I did so myself the first year or two after my wife died. Sometimes we can’t bear to speak to people, and others we can’t leave them alone. I’m glad you see no need to do more than ascertain that there was no offense intended.” He cut off another length of string, and looked apologetically at Pitt. “Young ladies can misunderstand the desire for their company, no doubt with cause, now and again.”
Reluctantly, Pitt introduced the subject of séances.
“Oh dear, how unfortunate!” Mr. Duncan’s face filled with alarm. “I am afraid he feels very strongly against that kind of thing. He was here when we had a local tragedy, quite a number of years ago now.” He chewed his lip, ignoring the hollyhocks. “A young woman had a child—out of wedlock, you know. Penelope, her name was. The child died almost immediately, poor little thing. Penelope was distraught with grief and went to a spirit medium who promised to put her in touch with her dead child.” He sighed. “Of course, the woman was a complete fraud, and when she discovered it, poor Penelope went quite wild with grief. It seems she thought she had spoken with the child, and that it had gone on to a far better place. She was comforted.” The muscles in his face tightened. “And then the deception drove her right out of her senses. I am afraid she took her own life. It was very dreadful, and poor Francis saw it all and was helpless to prevent any of it.
“He argued to have the child buried properly, but of course he lost, since it was illegitimate and unbaptized. He was very put out with the local minister over that. The feeling lasted for quite a while. Francis would have baptized the child regardless, and taken the consequences. But of course he didn’t have the power.”
Pitt tried to think of something to say that expressed the emotions boiling up inside him, and found nothing that touched the anger or the futility he felt.